Trayvon Martin and the Problem with Social Media

Yesterday morning I asked my partner if she knew anything about Trayvon Martin. I hadn't read a paper in weeks, or any online news articles for that matter, and we don't have television so I end up hearing everything through Facebook or from my students or other equally semi-reliable sources. My partner knew more than I did, and she told me what she knew, and then we sat together and read articles and looked at opinion pieces and blog posts. The new Sunday morning act of reading the paper, I suppose.

What I understood was that a white man (now identified as half-Latino), George Zimmerman, who was part of a neighborhood watch group in Sanford, Fl, and was on patrol during the incident, saw a young black man in a hoodie walking down his street. Already suspicious because of a string of home invasion robberies allegedly committed by a black suspect, Zimmerman armed with a gun pursued the man. From the 911 call made by one of Zimmerman's neighbors, screams for help can be heard in the background through half of the call and then the report of a gunshot, very clear, after which the screams stop. Apart from the spectrum of opinion articles that make some kind of political argument about the shooting and its circumstances, that's about all the facts I could make out (not even the ages of Zimmerman and Martin are always reported consistently).

Numbers and Narratives

Today I attended a grant-writing webinar sponsored by the NSF. It was a basic overview of strong proposals, the kind that get funding. I am a humanities professional, so some of the information wasn't applicable to my work or any future grants I might write for myself. In fact, I was there mainly to increase my knowledge about grant proposal writing in general, to learn as much as I could from those who are supplying most of the funding. The webinar reconfirmed for me the distance between the humanities and the sciences (and for that matter business, too), and the way we think about what we do.

What was emphasized most in the presentation (and I'm not giving away any trade secrets here) is the importance of being able to show measurable outcomes. The influence of the project must be quantifiable in some way. The kind of grant under consideration was one that involved a strong pedagogical component, so successful proposals would clearly articulate how they would measure the effects of their projects on student behavior, habits, and attitudes. At this point, the webinar broke down in a heated argument (not really) when a virtual attendee called into question the ability to measure student outcomes in an objective, quantitative way. He must have had some kind of training in my field. In the humanities, we tend to cringe when someone tries to measure someone or a group of someones, the word normative flashing in our heads. To measure is to assume a standard, a someone or something that is normal, by which all abnormality can be distinguished, organized, subjugated.

The Dangers of Love, Continued

In my last post, I talked briefly about how teachers are exploited because we are generally framed as being passionate about our work. We are required to see teaching as a labor of love and not just labor, and are therefore required to sacrifice our own best interests to the greater good of educating the next generation. And the more we buy into this myth of love and sacrifice, the more complicit we are in our own exploitation. That was the gist, anyway. It was more a rant than anything constructive or helpful. After doing a little searching for anyone who has felt a similar frustration about the way teachers have been discursively created by the myth of the passionate laborer, I came across this eloquent and carefully articulated post by low end theory.

The post incisively identifies a series of inter-related contradictions, the most arresting being the irony that "the university contains [and exploits] those that would challenge it not by suppressing them, but rather by giving them a space in which to work" and by doing so "keeps us working for it," not against it. The foundation of these spaces, says low end theory, are the "popular narratives" we tend to tell ourselves about making a difference in our students' lives, about introducing them to challenging discourses, about transforming the world through the student. In service to these ideas, we are always passionate and always willing to sacrifice. But of course the second we do, we become the victims of our own best intentions. Low end theory asks an important question about these narratives:

A Dose of Dispassion

A bit of a detour. A friend is on the job market right now (aren't we all?) and is looking for any kind of teaching job she can get while she finishes her PhD in literature. As anyone involved in lit knows, our funding requires that we teach courses in freshman composition. It's our bread and butter. Many of us would rather be teaching literature, I assume, but most of us understand that we get both money and protection from the university because we are willing to take on the burden of teaching writing (at a bargain, of course). Most of us don't love it. In fact, I don't even know many rhetoric folks who love teaching introductory comp courses. But most of us do understand how important it is, and some days we like doing it a great deal.

The Honor and Glory

Welcome to my newest enterprise, Carefully Disordered, a blog dedicated to discussing issues related to literature, education, and the humanities. Topics will focus in particular on the emergence of digital media and its effect on the traditional English literature learning and research environments.

Literature is something I love dearly and have dedicated my life to understanding and teaching, but over the past four years I've watched literature programs grow increasingly irrelevant in universities that no longer value or understand what literature has to offer its students. I want to use this blog to talk about  what literature has to offer in classrooms that are moving quickly in the direction of new media and all of the pedagogical changes that implies. I want to explore ways that teachers of traditional literature can begin to adapt, to change their expectations and methods, and to remediate, so to speak, their curricula to meet the needs of students who will need to engage new kinds of information in new ways.